Power phase question.

[Larz60+]

I think it's a misnomer, my understanding of what is called a power phase is really a transformer, possibly with regulation, that converts from one voltage to another, or regulates a source with same voltage. The reason it's called a 'phase', i believe, is that a motherboard (or even a CPU, like Haswell), may use distributed 'phases' to spread the job over more 'phases' in order to reduce load on each, and thus less heat.